I used to enjoy hacking the hell out of the resource files back in 2005-2006, and was using WindowBlinds etc, but when I began having real work to do I couldn't care less how the Windows looked. May get back to customization again w/ Windows 8 if I'll ever use it, the thing looks terrible from color choices to the stupid no start button thing and the cryptic gestures. I doubt I'll tho, maybe it will be the time for me to switch to Linux/Mac after all those years of being a loyal Windows user.

Noticed most of the people who created the themes (early days) all moved to the mac.

Yeah, I noticed that too. One of the best skin designers ever, the Skins Factory, they even moved to the mac or atleast their CEO did. Last I heard they released Hyperdesk for windows skin customization for vista/xp. I originally got into theming because of their awesome pixel perfect windows media player skins and then later by their suites. Then I moved to the mac and prefer just theming the icons and like the user interface to being clean and usable and not get in the way.

There's a natural explanation for that, Windows looks good, there's nothing to improve, they had to move to Mac so they had something to improve.

I doubt it, you really cannot customize much on OS X like how you could with windows xp. The most you can nowadays do is icons. Window designs are rare and hard to find with system file edits. With the release of Mountain Lion, there isn't anyway to change the dock even. And yes OS X apps have some best designed icons ever. You should see the attention to detail. Just checkout dribbble.com. The same can be said for iOS icons. OS X is meant to have neutral colors to the eyes and let the user work.

The problems in the design of OS X are small cosmetic issues with certain applications such as the linen, the leather used for calendar and address book. Hopefully this ugliness will be removed soon.

Have to agree with everyone here. Those days were great with awesome visual styles for XP popping up every week or so.

For Windows Vista the themes I used didn't go further than changing the glass effect or the taskbar. Windows 7, I probably used Zain's visual style once and that's it. And strangely for Windows 8, one of its selling points for me was the move to this simpler visual style. I never quite liked the ugly blue/purple menu and toolbars in Aero. The glass, while nice, did noticebly slow down the desktop experience with lots of windows open - and disabling transparency in Aero, the theme doesn't look that great. Try setting your window colour to be silver, then switch to the power saver mode and see if you can easily read off the time on the lower right corner.

Plus I've on occasion tried to sync my desktop and laptop together in terms of screenshots, while now it's already done automatically in Windows 8.

The desktop visual style in Windows 8 still needs work though - IE10's scrollbars still look bad, and Microsoft needs to let people use dark colours without completely obscuring the minimize/restore glyphs and titlebar text. A simple colour flip to white for RGB values who average to less than 100 should suffice. Even for many included colour selections in Windows 8, the colours are often too saturated to allow the black text to carry visual weight.

Noticed most of the people who created the themes (early days) all moved to the mac.

Including this guy ^

There's a natural explanation for that, Windows looks good, there's nothing to improve, they had to move to Mac so they had something to improve.

I doubt it, you really cannot customize much on OS X like how you could with windows xp. The most you can nowadays do is icons. Window designs are rare and hard to find with system file edits. With the release of Mountain Lion, there isn't anyway to change the dock even. And yes OS X apps have some best designed icons ever. You should see the attention to detail. Just checkout dribbble.com. The same can be said for iOS icons. OS X is meant to have neutral colors to the eyes and let the user work.

The problems in the design of OS X are small cosmetic issues with certain applications such as the linen, the leather used for calendar and address book. Hopefully this ugliness will be removed soon.

Well while it may not be possible in the latest versions, during vista and the early 7 days, they where rescinding everything in OSX, I recall dark resins where particularly popular but there was a lot of reskinning going on with OSX. And today a lot of people are reskinning to drop the skeuomorphism.

And after all, windows has more built in customization abilities from the get go with users abilities to change the colors of their windows.As for icons, that's p to the app designers themselves. There re many windows apps with icons that rival or even beat Mac icons, but of course when your app universe is 100 times bigger, there's going to be a larger amount of ugly apps/icons.

Windows users also tend to be more focused on the app working no working good/effectively, whereas an apple users will pick the pretty app over the working app. The App Store shows this effect a lot. Personally, I wish I could have both, I wish my mirc could have the function of mirc with the mdi windows, or a tileable interface with the looks of one of the nice new metro irc clients.